Impact of Incredible Years Training on Latent Profiles of Teacher Perceptions of Parent Involvement

Introduction: Parent involvement in school is essential to lessen negative outcomes for youth. Extant research strongly suggests that when parents are involved in their child’s education, those youth are more likely to adopt prosocial behaviors, complete homework, obtain better grades, graduate, and attend college. Conversely, low parent involvement predicts poor child academic, behavioral, emotional and social interactions with peers and teachers—increasing the likelihood these youth develop poor relations with teachers characterized by less support and increased disapproval. These teacher child interactions are among the cascade of events predictive of deviant peer associations and distal antisocial behaviors.

Escalating the cascade, teachers of students with challenging behaviors often develop negative views of the youth’s family. The views—irrespective of accuracy—condition interactions between students and teachers and influence a caregiver’s willingness to work with a teacher when a child is struggling in school. Emerging research suggests programs promoting adaptive teacher perceptions of parents of youth with challenging behaviors confer benefits in terms of improved child performance at school. To this end, we present findings from a group-randomized trial of the Incredible Years teacher training program (IY) on changes in teacher perceptions of parent involvement.     

Methods: Teachers (N=42) and students (N=805) were cluster randomized into treatment (IY; n=504) and control conditions (CC; n=301). To examine the effects of IY on teacher perceptions of parent involvement, latent profile transition analysis (LPTA) was applied to teacher ratings at pre and posttest waves. Parent involvement was measured using teacher responses to the T-INVOLVE scales of parent involvement in education (6 items; α=.91) and with school/teacher (7 items; α=.84) and parent bonding (7 items; α=.76).

Results: There were no differences between the IY or CC at baseline on child ratings, covariates or profile variables. Pre and posttest cross-sectional analyses revealed a 4-profile model fit the data well. The four class model was validated using teacher ratings of child behavior before the data were examined in the longitudinal LPTA framework. The LPTA results suggested IY—compared to CC teachers—transitioned to more adaptive profiles marked by improved views of parent involvement and bonding, χ² (2, N = 805) = 16.46, p < .003, Cramer’s V = .143. In addition, more IY teachers remained in the same profiles while, counterfactually, CC teachers were less likely to progress, χ² (2, N = 715) = 6.03, p < .008, Cramer’s V = .09.      

Conclusions: Findings here suggest targeting teacher awareness and perceptions of parent involvement may hold the promise of improving child performance at school. Teachers-parent pairs who transitioned to more adaptive profiles were also associated with more favorable student outcomes. Thus prevention programs targeting the status of teacher perceptions of parent involvement may cultivate successful proximal child level improvements buffering the cascade of events leading to poor distal outcomes.